Summary :
“Signifi er” and “Signifi ed”: Reclaiming Saussure’s Legacy This new edition of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) restores the Saussure that generations of English readers grew up on: Wade Baskin’s 1959 translation. In addition to its inherent elegance, Baskin’s translation of the lectures Saussure gave at the end of his life at the University of Geneva is indispensable for a very particular reason, one that Roy Harris’s 1983 translation wholly obscures: the rendition of Saussure’s terms “ signifi ant ” and “ signifi é ” ( CLG 1972, 99) as “signifi er” and “signifi ed” ( CGL 1959, 67). These equivalent neologisms in French and English embody precisely what is revolutionary about Saussure’s thought and what is specifi c to it. Baskin’s translation makes this revolution clear. Saussure presents the solution to a problem in the history of ideas that stretches back to Plato and that reached crisis proportions in the late nineteenth century: the problem of reference. Most familiar as a problem in poetics, it is a problem in all media, including the life sciences, which is why Saussure reconceived the problem of reference as one of signifi cation. Many false starts delayed Saussure’s discovery until the end of his life, daunted as he was by the numerous historical contexts in which he had to test his ideas in order to ensure their durability. Traditionally cast as the problem of mimesis—of language as imitating or representing what it refers to—the problem of reference is put on an entirely different footing by what Saussure eventually achieved.

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